If you're running Vista in Vmware then you probably only have d3d9. Check dxdiag.The only way you're going to be able to use dgvoodoo 2 in Vmware with Vista+ currently is to use WARP which will be slow.

You need DirectX 11 for dgVoodoo to be functional because all functionality is accessed via DIrect3D 11 runtime. On Vista, this means you need Service Pack 2 and KB971512. D3DCompiler_47.dll from dgVoodoo download page is also recommended (put it in C:\Windows\SysWOW64), even though the D3DCompiler_43.dll you get by installing this is sufficient for now.

Still, despite the latest update log saying WARP should be selected automatically if other variant fails, this still doesn't appear to be the case on my side in Windows 7 VMware virtual machine. Selecting it manually works on Windows 7, but on Vista, nothing works, both WARP and 10.0 feature level mode fail, something about DDI init failure ends up in the log. Unigine Heaven 4.0 on the other hand works fine when selecting DirectX 11. Maybe dgVoodoo assumes multisampling/anti-aliasing is always available?

UCyborg wrote:You need DirectX 11 for dgVoodoo to be functional because all functionality is accessed via DIrect3D 11 runtime. On Vista, this means you need Service Pack 2 and KB971512. D3DCompiler_47.dll from dgVoodoo download page is also recommended (put it in C:\Windows\SysWOW64), even though the D3DCompiler_43.dll you get by installing this is sufficient for now

Much thanks. Yup, this was it; it seems DX11 is mandatory for the current Voodoo2.

Now Voodoo2 sees all the proper Output API's but it still doesn't work; why, well guess what, VMware doesn't support DX11. If Voodoo2 worked with DX10, I'd of been good to go from the beginning., all this for nothing.

DX11 is mandatory on the software level, Vista with said update and all newer systems already pass that requirement. What's important here is what features it requires from the hardware. dgVoodoo supports feature levels 10.0 and 10.1, which means graphics card that supports DirectX 10.0 will do, albeit with some restrictions, they're mentioned somewhere in its documentation. So VMware actually passes the minimum requirement in theory.

I played various games on my previous PC that used Direct3D 9 Runtime or Direct3D 8 Runtime (d3d9.dll and d3d8.dll respectively). It had NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440, which is a DirectX 7 compliant graphics card. So how did such games run? Simple, they just scaled down and only used features supported by the graphics card. On better hardware, they could use extra graphical candy. Feature levels is the newer term, see this.

Yes, UCyborg is right. DX11 is only the library frontend for dgVoodoo but DX11 can drive DX10-level GPU's (DDI or backend), and because of dgVoodoo support feature level 10.0, it should work.

I have a Win7 SP1 virtual machine (re-)installation, with VMWare SVGA 3D driver. DX10 DDI is supported according to DXDIAG. Tried dgVoodoo with it and got to the following:- The CPL detects and handles 'DX11 (feature level 10.0)' correctly.- The wrapper itself failed to initialize when tried with a demo.

It turns out that VMWare SVGA driver doesn't support neither compute shaders nor feature 'structured-buffers-through-pixel-shaders'. Support for both of them are optional in DX10.x, a thing I always forget about...But what were weird is that even WARP didn't support them. I think I'm going to install Platform Update for my virtual Win7 to see if anything changes.

Mechwarrior2: I tried to have a look at it long ago but AFAIR I couldn't install (or run?) it because the game always crashed for me.This game is the one that has a custom installer and can be run through DosBox, right?

Dege wrote:It turns out that VMWare SVGA driver doesn't support neither compute shaders nor feature 'structured-buffers-through-pixel-shaders'. Support for both of them are optional in DX10.x, a thing I always forget about...But what were weird is that even WARP didn't support them. I think I'm going to install Platform Update for my virtual Win7 to see if anything changes.

Thank you for looking into this. It would be great if dgVoodoo2 was a working option with VMware.

Dege wrote:Mechwarrior2: I tried to have a look at it long ago but AFAIR I couldn't install (or run?) it because the game always crashed for me.This game is the one that has a custom installer and can be run through DosBox, right?

The best and easiest way to run Mechwarrior 2 on winXP,Vista or win7 is to simply install Mechwarrior 2 through the latest MechVM program.

Yes, I own the original non-3D accelerated version of Mechwarrior 2 for Dos and it works fine in Dos box. Not sure how well a Dos 3D accelerated version works in Dos however.

Only a few versions of Mech2 are Dos or have a Dos install option on them. Most 3dfx cards at the time shipped with a windows only version. I think most people, myself included, only have access to a win9x version.

Nice to learn something new about VMware's SVGA driver. I totally missed with that anti-aliasing guess, just an assumption from the error thrown by Unigine Heaven when trying to use it. Will be cool to see dgVoodoo in action on VMware.

I've read that Interstate '76 uses MechWarrior 2 engine. I76 has a number of odd glitches. I didn't go to deep into it, but have noticed its GDI renderer fails on NT systems, assuming BitBlt function should return the width of the whatever it renders to, which only happens on 9x systems. I wonder if documentation ever said something about that; as long as it returns positive value, everything's OK. And the game must run at 20 FPS due to physics. The fan forum says 24 FPS is the golden number, but I always thought 20 is better for correctness, it's hard to tell honestly.

The gold patch also brings in some new problems (and a Glide2 renderer). The most interesting thing about its Glide renderer, I only managed to get it working without glitches with dgVoodoo1, with the two magic settings: Texture mem size set to maximum (65536 kB) and Texmem scaled to 4MB enabled. Otherwise it would glitch, textures flashing, being randomly replaced with others to be precise. Supposedly this occurs on the real Voodoo card as well.

"The file MW2SND consists mostly of binary data, but starting from offset 38h (56 decimal), there is a filename. It may be either MCGA.DLL, or VESA480.DLL. Change it into VESA768.DLL and save the file."

Or maybe it's enough to trick the game copying&renaming VESA768.DLL -> VESA480.DLL